The Not-So-Thin Thread of Thankfulness

It was just the other day when I caught a glimpse of it, in that still moment of reflection when someone asked, just before the turkey and sweet potato casserole, “So, what are you thankful for?” Truth be told, at the moment of hunger? Not so thankful for questions about thankfulness!

But it is good to be slowed down ... I am too often in a hurry. Taste your food, and savor it. Make more room for these "Consider the lilies" moments. And so I do...

And soon, thankful thoughts begin to race like wildfire. Faces appear, some right in front of me, others from the not-so-distant past – both smiling, and weeping. It is a privilege that I am here at all, I think; to experience this life of joys and sorrows - it is a gift. That too, is grace.

Now as I sit here, days from Thanksgiving, typing thoughts and words and dreams with the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s What Child is This? keeping time with my tapping, I consider, How strange that that one small question about thankfulness can bring a sense that, in gratitude, I am “getting warmer, warmer,” like the children’s game when you’re closing in on the hidden prize. It’s so easy to be in a hurry; add to that, to become jaded about this life, and revert to the status-quo of criticism and the pretended wisdom of the cynic ... it all thwarts this desired gratitude.

Thankfully, a Christmas carol jolts me back to the warmer place, leaving behind the “always winter, but never Christmas” hopelessness that Lewis described. Ahh, there it is again - Christmas working backwards, to put the real thanks into “Thanks-giving.”

Surprised by Gratitude

But of course, it makes no sense at all to be thankful if you’ve been operating from the assumption (maybe even the desired belief) that there really is no one there to say thanks to, right? I remember hearing how the great writer G.K. Chesterton was surprised by this fact, and at a moment in his life when faith still eluded him…

As the story goes, while out strolling one day, he “happened upon” two aspiring artists on the river bank, poised at their easels. Brushes in hand, they attempted to capture the serene beauty of the landscape – for it was a stunningly beautiful day. Pausing to watch them paint, Chesterton could not help notice how their conversation seemed strangely out-of-place, for despite the overwhelming beauty before them, they were filled with complaining. Oddly, and in marked contrast, he found his own heart wanting to say “thank-you” to someone. Beauty, after all, had smote his heart, and it must be acknowledged. But where was this strange sense of gratitude coming from, he wondered? And to whom could it possibly be directed? Chesterton would later say that from that moment onward, he began to hold on to faith by “the thin thread of thankfulness.”

Ann's Story

For years, Ann Voskamp struggled to see any reason for thankfulness at all. At 4 years of age (her earliest memory), she watched as her 18 month-old sister Aimee, the little sister with the silken hair, was crushed in their driveway by a farm truck. Her mother saw it too, watching in helpless horror from the kitchen window. Later, Ann observed how a cloud of despair set in upon her and her family, a winter chill that would not depart. From that moment, her father abandoned faith. And by the time she was in college, Ann was on anti-depressants and suffered with a fear of almost everything (agoraphobia).

It’s painful for me to write these things. I’m reminded of my own family’s suffering - my sister’s ongoing struggle to live life in a wheelchair after a car accident at 17, and dad's cancer. How do you take a risk on love again when you’ve been cut so deeply? And just how do you unclench your fists and open your heart to even the possibility of God – let along a good God who doesn’t deal in cruel jokes and seemingly senseless pain – when you've experienced such great losses? What is God up to?

Love will avoid the easy answers, the “buck up and bear it” or “God works all things for good” response that attempts to make it all go away (so we don’t have to feel it), or explain it with a self-righteous platitude. No, let mystery be mystery, and learn to weep with those who weep is the first order of business.

But there is more. One of the profound things such pain produced in Ann Voskamp’s life was to one day awaken her heart to the suggestion and challenge of a friend: create a list of 1,000 things you are thankful for. In starting, Ann realized something vital: If I am to really do this, I must begin with “the little gifts” of each day. The colors in a soap bubble as she washed the dishes. Children building a snow-fort, making a door in the side. The falling of leaves from an oak. New toothbrushes. Nylons without runs.… (I will leave the rest of the list for you to read and discover yourself! Put her book One Thousand Gifts on your Christmas wish-list. You'll be thankful you did!)

How Gratitude Can Change Us

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.~  Sarah Ban Breathnach

Gratitude is the natural response when we begin to understand grace. And while on some days it seems so impossible to find, it has a way of transforming us as we follow it back to a loving God's hand. As Ann writes, 

I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I’ve seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy ,when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering. The converse does. 

The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest light to the world. When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks.”

What is this dare to write down a thousand "thank-yous?" Try it - start with just ten or twenty - and you will see what Ann herself discovered about our hearts: “Something always comes to fill the empty places. And when I give thanks for the seemingly microscopic, I make a place for God to grow within me…” What then is the real beauty behind the list? “It is really a dare to name all the ways that God loves me…” To bow before His wisdom, and to see who He really is. All that He has done, and has promised. And all because a greater gift has been given...

“On the night he was betrayed,  the Lord Jesus took some bread… and giving thanks, He broke it and said, “This is my body, which is given for you ..
~ I Corinthians 11:23,24

A Scandalous Grace

So here’s a bit of good news for the Penn State victimizers: God never said you’ll go to hell for being a child molester - or even an administration or coaching staff that knew, and “should’ve done more.” But more on that in a minute. 

When Penn State coaching legend Joe Paterno addressed reporters early after the abuse went public, his impulse was to say one thing, at least, of especially great value: “Pray for the victims.” Indeed. Pray for them, for the sting of this victimization will not fade with the camera lights, but will linger. But have you and I asked ourselves what to pray for, specifically? Do we have any sense what the victims will really need in the days and years to come?

Childhood victims of sexual abuse grow up to tell us many things. Here, in the form of a prayer, are some things that they especially struggle to believe:

1.) God, (if You are even there) - it’s so hard to trust now sometimes – you, or anyone. I trusted once and got hurt. Do you love me? Where were you? I felt (and sometimes still feel) so abandoned…  

2.) God, are you good? How can it be? Is the song I learned in Sunday School, “Jesus loves me, this I know…” just a farce?

3.) Does real love even exist? Or is it a lie, and do people just want to use you up and throw you away?

4.) What is my body good for? Is it just certain parts of me that are worth anything? (I hate those parts - they invited pain). I will never let myself be touched again…by anyone.

5.) God, sometimes I also feel such guilt that my body “responded” to the stimulation. And afterwards, I felt so ashamed, I couldn’t speak. How could I possibly tell anyone what happened?

6.) So now you know what I do…I squash my pain again and again with over-eating, or alcohol abuse, or whatever else helps me to “check out” of life and stay numb to the pain. I’ve even thrown myself into elicit sex, and allowed myself to be used again - it’s all I must be good for, right? But I feel nothing, I am a hollow shell…

Our Prayer 

1.) Oh Father, your heart breaks for those who have been victimized by selfish lust. Our hearts break too. 

2.) We must believe You weren’t absent, or caught off-guard, but caught every tear that fell.     Help them to believe this too. Even now You store each tear in your bottle, for they are precious to you (Psalm 56:8) – yet we still sometimes struggle to know why You didn’t intervene to stop it… 

3.) Oh Jesus, you reveal to us the Father’s heart. And we remember that Your name is Immanuel (God with us), who came down to the mess -  to walk in our shoes, to feel our pain, to endure our rejection, and then to die our death. You know abandonment (for we have often abandoned You), you know firsthand the pain of rejection. You even know the shame of being stripped naked before wicked men: “And they stripped Him…” (Matthew 27:28)

And yet because your Father didn’t intervene to stop it, great good came to the world. So too, bring good to the world through this suffering, as you did with Joseph (Gen. 50:20), and ultimately, Jesus.

4.) Merciful God, please begin to show the broken-hearted (for words are not enough) that their bodies are a gift, incredibly good, and were never meant to be treated as an object for someone’s selfish pleasure…

5.) ... and that their body responded as it was designed – for this is how You made it. Surround them too with loving people who will begin to transform the abuser’s touch through the healing touch of real love – the love of Jesus, revealed through them. 

6.) Father, help them to trust your love, which is greater than our darkness; help us all to see it with our own eyes, growing in the world. We pray that our churches will be a safe place of refuge - help us not to be ignorant or silent. Keep us near the cross, where we see that love most. 

7.) Help each of these children to grieve the loss, and to run to You… In the name of Jesus, who has retained His scars even while He waits until the day when He will wipe every tear from our eyes, and put all things to right…

8.) Finally, God, we trust that you will bring about justice for the oppressed – a better justice than we ourselves can muster. We dare, by your grace, to pray for the victimizers also – may their end not be this: 

"But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." (Matthew 18:6)

(And thank-you that you care so much for the victimized to include this verse in Your Word). May the victimizer too find mercy at the foot of the cross - and rise, forgiven, to make real restitution to their victims.

Now, to return to the beginning…

Grace is indeed scandalous to our senses, but oh so humbling. Why must it be so? Because we have all – each one - done the unimaginable: our sin has killed the precious and perfect Son of God. Which means that anything else must pale in comparison…and that is why no child molester will ever be separated from God on the basis of his crimes alone, but for this only: if He (or she) rejects the one rescue that God Himself has provided – Jesus and His cross. Any rejection of that great sacrifice is an attempt to establish one’s own “self salvation project”(see Rom. 10:3) – be it through sex, career, money, personal reform - or even religion. 

As the words of the old hymn put it:

“His blood has made the foulest clean,

His blood availed for me.” (O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing, Charles Wesley)

So it seems that even at Penn State, the field is quite level before the cross. The beauty of a scandalous grace is this: even tainted football fields and locker rooms can be transformed by the touch of Amazing grace.

So now, let us pray…  

What's Love Telling Me to Do Right Now?

If anyone ever answered that question fully, completely, most beautifully, in everything He said and did, it was Jesus. See the way Jesus loves, and you see love elevated to an art-form. See how he answered the question, when gazing at the cross before him ... with thoughts of you. Thank him for such amazing, completely unmerited, love.

Now let yourself ask the question again, and answer with the first person who comes to mind.

  

(PS Sometimes a great question becomes a life-mission. The question jumped out at me the other day while listening to a band my son enjoys (and now I do too), called Baths. Asked in a song called Maximalist)